Theresa May at last year’s Conservative party conference. ‘Success this year may well be May managing to deliver an address that doesn’t leave her own closest aides writhing with embarrassment.’
Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

“How are things? Well, they’re not shit, like you’re suggesting,” said one senior Tory MP this week. Just as I was beginning to wonder if he was rather more optimistic than most of his colleagues, he continued: “No, they’re not shit, as shit is too weak a word. If I needed a word to describe the way things are going, I’d probably go for dysentery. That gets closer.”

Not all Tories use such colourful language – indeed, I know one who leaves the Commons smoking room in protest whenever Anna Soubry is present because he feels upset by her fruity turn of phrase – but all pull the same facial expression when you ask how things are. There’s a gritting of the teeth and widening of the eyes, normally accompanied by a sarcastic, “Oh, things are just great!”

The last time I saw these facial expressions and heard such language, Labour was at the end of its time in government. Exhausted, out of ideas and bickering in public, the party looked as though it needed a spell in opposition to sort itself out. It was understandable, given the length of its 13-year period in power. Less excusable, perhaps, is the fact that the Tories, in their ninth year of government, have already had at least 12 months of behaving like Labour did at the very end.

Much of the debate is about personality rather than policy: perhaps everyone has run out of ideas

At last year’s Conservative conference, everyone looked knackered. The prime minister’s speech hardly dispelled that impression: her voice was knackered too, and the set disintegrated. Success this year may well be Theresa May managing to deliver an address that doesn’t leave her own closest aides writhing with embarrassment. This is the sort of low bar that No 10 sets, not just for conferences, but for each week in Westminster too. The reshuffle at the start of this year was focused less on what May wanted to achieve in policy terms, and more on getting the party ready for the next election. “For a good long while now, our objective has merely been survival,” complains one secretary of state.

There are senior ministers and backbenchers who claim that things can be turned around and that there are plenty of clever plans brewing in the lower echelons of the party. Ministers say they’ve got plenty of ideas – it’s just that those ideas end up languishing in a dusty in-tray in Downing Street without ever seeing the light of day. George Freeman, a very vocal MP who is trying both to set up an alternative policy platform and to launch some kind of leadership bid himself, used to be No 10’s policy chief, and still argues that the Conservative party is fizzing with schemes for its regeneration. But the prime minister’s aides can only recall him sending over reams of articles and links, rather than wowing them with his proposals. It isn’t clear whether Downing Street wasn’t really engaging with domestic policy, or whether there wasn’t as much to Freeman’s platform as he claimed.

If the latter also applies to the wider party, this would explain why so much of the debate is about personality rather than policy: perhaps everyone has run out of ideas. Boris Johnson, for instance, has upset colleagues recently with his adoption of Trump-style attention-seeking behaviour, causing them to forget that he was once a political melting pot, promoting “leftwing” ideas such as a living wage alongside more traditional Tory fare. The debate has become about his language rather than what he thinks the Conservative party should do for the country over the next few years.

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And yes, this means we are returning to what is becoming a perennial lament about the Conservative party’s lack of a domestic agenda. This complaint unites all wings of the Tories like nothing else. Good secretaries of state turn up in their departments with an idea of what they personally want to do; bad ones turn up and wait for instructions from No 10 that never come. But even those who might be full of reforming zeal won’t get all that far: I understand that the long-awaited and even longer-needed changes to the social care system are now unlikely to be implemented in this parliament, given the scheduling of a green paper that merely consults on options for reform.

This is roughly where the party was a year ago, which is a miserable thought for those Conservatives who thought they might have spent the past 12 months making the most of their good luck at still being in government. Those at the top of the party should beware of conforming to a description even worse than “shit” or “dysentery”: the damning phrase “in office but not in power”.